1818.] " M. Le Sage. 2=19 



he necessarily pardoned them. In summing up the merits of 

 Le Sage, we must not omit to mention that he was a steady and 

 faithful friend ; and although so little qualified to engage the 

 notice of the multitude, there were few persons who could boast 

 of the sincere attachment of a larger circle of men of distinguished 

 talents and worth. 



Although Le Sage did not publish any connected or complete 

 view of his theory, yet it has been brought forward, in a more or 

 less perfect form, by his friends or pupils. Its great object was 

 to give a mechanical explanation of the cause of gravity, or phy- 

 sical attraction, and to refer all the phenomena to the effect of 

 impulse. When Newton had explained the laws of the system 

 of the world by attraction, he was aware that there might be 

 some mechanical cause for attraction itself ; but neither he nor 

 any of his contemporaries or pupils were able to reveal the 

 mystery. Indeed for some time the attempt was entirely aban- 

 doned, either as hopeless, or as useless ; and no theory that had 

 been offered on the subject was regarded as of any value, when 

 Le Sage undertook to solve the problem, and devoted all his 

 energy, and a large portion of his life, to the attempt. The 

 agents which produce these grand effects are styled by our 

 author gravific corpuscles, or atoms 5 and it must be admitted 

 that if we once allow of their existence, and conceive them to 

 possess the properties that he assigned to them, the actual 

 phenomena of attraction and gravitation must be the necessary 

 result. These atoms, which are supposed to be indefinitely 

 small, traverse through space in all directions, each atom moving 

 in a straight line in a determined direction, and with a velocity 

 much superior to that of light. The directions of these atoms 

 are various, and their velocity is so great, that although they follow 

 at an immense distance from each other, so that space may be 

 considered almost as a vacuum, yet they abound every where. 

 To comprehend this apparent paradox, we must bear in mind 

 that the atoms pass through every point of space in all direc- 

 tions in an indefinitely short interval of time ; so that every point 

 may be regarded as the centre of an innumerable assemblage of 

 atoms, both converging and diverging ; or we may conceive that, 

 at every instant, a multitude cf atoms arrive at this point from 

 all parts of space, and that, at the same instant, a number of 

 atoms pass from it to all parts, in every possible direction. Hav- 

 ing formed to ourselves this idea of a gravific fluid, let us now 

 conceive a solid body immersed in it, bounded by convex sur- 

 faces, or by projecting angles, and much larger than an atom of 

 the fluid. This body will remain immoveable, or, at least, it will 

 not be urged by any constant motion ; if can only be tossed about 

 by the inequality of the currents, so as to make irregular oscilla- 

 tions. But if we now immerse into the fluid a second body, at 

 some distance from the first, the two bodies will approach each 

 other. FoY One will now serve as a kind of guard, or akreen to 



